In the End
by Rhelle
Summary: [A Noa introspective, dedicated to Alexi Serenitia] A mind as fractured as the world it inhabits, a fallen angel who became a demon in a world that does not exist...and is changed forever by the simple love of a lost child, a lost brother.


know I promised "Shadowlights" to be out, but…the plot bunnies attacked. So…Yay, a Noa fic! *^^* Because we all love that green-haired little freak.

Dedicated to Alexi Serenitia, _the_ Noa fangirl. Here ya go, hun :::kidnaps Noa and gives him to her, wrapped in ribbons with a cherry on top ^.~ :::

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In the End

Noa. I'm sure you've heard of me. Noa. The dead child who became a dark god in a world that does not really exist. The little fallen angel who became a demon with a prophet's name. Noa.

Noa, biblical savior, visionary. Noa, who heard the voice of God and saved all the creatures of the earth before the darkness came to sweep them away.

Noa, son of a mortal woman and an angel of the Lord.

Noa, me. Noa, son of a human monster and a woman he never knew. Noa, who could not even save his own tainted soul.

For my soul is lost as my body was lost, cast to the shifting sands of time. The soul cannot exist without the body, and the body cannot exist without the soul. Mind, body, soul; twisting strands woven together into the one thing that we are. 

Mine were torn apart long ago. My body is gone into darkness, rotting in the earth. My soul is lost, if ever I had one.

The body is a lamp and the soul a flame, the being a creature born of light.

And what am I but a creature of the darkness, of the shadows that lurk in every mind?

I stand now before my father's grave, where I buried the memory of him in my mind. We all do it, you know. We all carry with us all the dead we have ever loved. Always.

Only I never loved him. 

A cherry tree stands guard over his grave, its shadow shifting with the dance of a breeze and the light of a sun that does not exist. Shedding _sakura_ blossoms as it ever has, locked in perpetual springtime, flowers the color of purity touched with blood forever falling like tears to his grave.

How beautiful. And how he would have hated it.

The sunlight shimmers off the single white cross - unmarked, uninscribed - that stands above his grave.

Did you know that before Christ sanctified it with His death, the cross was a torture device, an instrument of death? Hung on it until the heart and lungs finally collapsed from the strain. The cruelest form of execution in the ancient world was crucifixion.

How fitting that it be your cenotaph, Gozaburo.

For you always were a tormentor, a tyrant, weren't you, Gozaburo? Terrible as any that ever marred human history. From your iron will and your ruthless cunning, a great corporation arose. You crushed all those who challenged you, and dominated all those who served you.

It was the path that led to your success, and in the end, the path that led to your demise. You found an equal in Seto Kaiba, and you tried to break him, as you had broken so many others, tried to bend him to your will, kill the independence and defiance in his fierce, proud soul. And in the end, he killed you.

Gozaburo.

No. I never loved him. I never knew how.

It was the life he gave me that I loved, much as I ever could with my dark heart. Sometimes, if I try, I can almost remember what it was like to be alive.

The voice of a violin through the silence; the scent and sense of a garden in summer; the motions of riding a horse, hooves like a heartbeat, like blood pounding through living veins, flying like a breath of wind over the fields - flying like the soul through life.

There is nothing like that here. Only an empty dream. Nothing but hatred and festering rage. And a name.

Seto Kaiba.

Ah yes, Seto. Seto _Kaiba_. You stole that name from me, you stole my future, my life, all it might have been.

What was my birthright belongs to you now. The life I was born and bred for, you are living.

Perhaps that is what I hate you for most.

Life.

…But never mind. I will have what you took from me. And I will have my revenge. I have thought of nothing else for years.

I reach out through my web of wires that encircles the world, searching for other casualties of your rise to power, others who hate you almost as much as I do. Allies in vengeance.

They're not hard to find.

If I cannot walk in your world, Seto, I will force you to walk in mine. Create my net and cast it, draw you and your unfortunate companions into my world, shimmers of life in the shadows: the Pharaoh, the dice player, the streetboy, the sister, the dancer girl, the loser fool.

Oh, and of course, at the front of them all - Seto, proud as the royal priest you were in another lifetime, another age. (I am no part of such things, though; this age, and all it holds, is the beginning and end of my long imagining.)

And with him, as always, the child, his brother. Mokuba.

Fear me, all of you. For I am God in this world, and I have no love for life or the living.

And woe to the one who has incurred my wrath.

I play my games with you, Seto, as a cat plays with a mouse between its paws. I force your future into your past, make you face the one thing that you fear most - your own tainted history….

You were always good at games, weren't you, Seto? But I think even you will know how this one will end.

And that the price is your very body and soul.

Everything you took from me, I will take from you. A company, a name, a legacy that long ago would have been mine.

And I will take the one thing in your heart that you love - your brother, Mokuba.

Ah, Mokuba. Child born of broken dreams, with eyes the color of midnight and hair like raven's wings, fierce as a wildcat kitten. Seto's brother, truly.

And yet, he loved. Even Seto, who hated the world, he loved.

Even me, he loved.

I have never known such love. I cannot walk in darkness, for it lights me from within.

And now I have pitted you, little one, against your own brother, who might have been brother to me, too, had things all been different.

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So close, and yet so far away….

And revenge should be sweet, but it is not. The fulfillment of hate should be delicious, but there is nothing left.

Oh, the mirthless irony of the world. I would laugh, if the tears were not bitter on my heart.

Sometimes the things we most despise are simply the things in which we most see ourselves.

Oh, Mokuba. How long has it been since you first set foot in my father's house? From that day on I have been with you. I guarded your footsteps even as you walked in darkness; through all the endless nights you shivered alone, through all the days tainted with intrigue and a cruelty you could not comprehend. But there was joy, too, and happiness, and I was happy with you, for a time.

You were life to me when I languished in death. You were love to me when I was consumed by hate.

You might have been my salvation. And what have I been to you but betrayal and a cage?

I saw life in you, Mokuba, vibrant and painful and everlasting. And knew that I belonged to death.

For years my mind has been locked in this world that is no world, in the hinterland between life and death, denied one and denying the other. My body rots in its tomb of glass and steel. My soul, like the _ba_ of the ancient Egyptian dead, is a lost bird left to range the stars forever.

In the end, I stand before the monster that was my father, roused from is long sleep by hatred and lust for revenge. The only thing alive in him is hate. The only thing that matters to him is revenge. He has used me to that end, even as I have used others.

Is this the mirror of myself? Is this what I am, what I have become?

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Father, why have you forsaken me?

And so the past cometh to consume the future, and who can stop it but the one who began it all?

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"Father, we're dead."

I bear him with me down into oblivion. I, who have always feared death, give into its darkness now so that others might live on in the light.

Seto. Mokuba.

Seto…there are some things we will never know.

You would have been my brother, in another life.

And Mokuba. Ah, Mokuba. I never knew I had a soul until it was lost to darkness. I never knew I had a heart until I felt it breaking.

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Remember me, I say to him, holding him to me one last time. _As this. Not as enemy or captor…but as a brother who loved you._

And so in the end, I do the only thing I can do, go the only place I can go - into death, and so, perhaps, into life. Into darkness, or light eternal.

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~*FINIS*~

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So there ya have it ^^;; Tell me how this was, people, because I wrote 2/3 of it in under four days X___x I'm a wicked slow writer. That's major for me.

Review! ^-^;;


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